The hot news doctrine, created a century ago to prevent telegraphy from spoiling the prospects of East Coast newspapers, is having a resurgence in the digital era. It's just been used to squash publications by financial news aggregator Web sites.

Using several different social networks can get confusing. Threadsy aggregates a bunch of them in a Web app, and mostly manages to make it compelling. It's basically a one-stop shop for online communication.

When reading about developments in the ailing printed news industry, we tend to hear arguments presented from the old media side of the fence. Now Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, has stepped up, and he thinks the industry will survive, in a different form.

Rupert Murdoch is so concerned about the future of traditional (i.e. his) news publishing at the hands of Google, he's launched paid Web newspapers via an online club. But if Google's so evil, why doesn't he block its Webcrawlers?